Homer Simpson taught us 20 years ago that unlimited tar-tar sauce is the secret to keeping the peace. I think this holds true for any and all dips… let people shovel as much as that stuff into their mouth as they can handle and I guarantee there would be no more wars.

Larry Luna was sitting in line when he became impatient and began honking, screaming, and yelling at the woman in front of him placing her order. Things escalated fast, witnesses say, when the woman stepped out of her car and Luna pointed a pistol at her.

Ordering fast food: serious business.

To make this one better, he’s a school teacher, and the superintendent is on the case:

“These are just horrible distractions,” said Smith. He says Luna has been a Spanish teacher at the high school since 2006, and confirmed the woman involved was the mother of a Harrisburg student. “Since this is not a workplace misconduct, assuming that it’s true, we really have to sit and let this develop,” explained Smith.

Well I’m sure you’re all feeling very smug and self-satisfied, but the outrage of a surcharge for dipping sauce is only the beginning of the slippery slope toward Islamocommunofacism. You call this man a criminal? I call him a freedom fighter.

I just can’t help but wonder if it’s the feeling of powerlessness as our government, investments, future all seem to be spiraling out of reach that is at the root of many of these seemingly random flip outs.

Maybe we’re all Falling Down?

I mean, all y’all, not me. I’m a perfectly happy and functional member of society #NSAHappyFun

I suspect that attempting to alleviate anxiety over starkly limited agency is as old or older than humanity (see also: any ritual/religious/magical attempt to propitiate the spirits/ensure favorable weather/manage disease or fertility, or just about anything else you can think of, which definitely stretch back to the dawn of recorded history, and seem quite likely to have just been practiced by illiterate people before that point. Some evo-psych research team is probably demonstrating magical thinking in great apes as we speak).

That said, it isn’t exactly a novel thesis that modernity is surprisingly bad in terms of anxiety and uncertainty with respect to agency (especially when you consider that it’s pretty much the best time in history in terms of having actual power over the world and your fate. Shove over Asclepius, and take 1x 250mg Azithromycin daily, one of these two things will make your throat feel better…) It wouldn’t surprise me if a combination of powerlessness (combined with the substantial effectiveness of the modern nation state in curbing serious violence, relative to historical levels), makes for a lot of fodder for the ‘wacky hijinks’ file.

Manager of a Jason’s Deli actually wanted to charge me for an extra pat of butter. And that was after my bill had been rung up and paid for by credit card. Never went back. He lost a customer over 3¢ of butter. Filled out a customer response card and dropped it in the box, but never heard anything back, so he, or someone at the store, was removing any unflattering responses.

You make some good points, fuzzyfungus. I would say a couple of things. The pace of change is, I would argue, near an historical high. We have a new task in just keeping up with this change.

And then, yes, in many ways we live lives that would be the envy of ye olde monarchs, but for every penicillin, there’s antibiotic resistance. My local market has an astounding array of food, but it’s production may not be sustainable in a warming world. The internet makes these conversations possible, and also the global surveillance state. You get a free frogurt, but the frogurt contains sodium benzoate (that’s bad).

So it’s not that we don’t have agency or a lot of things we didn’t used to, it’s that all those things now come with strings attached.

So it’s not that we don’t have agency or a lot of things we didn’t used to, it’s that all those things now come with strings attached.

Oh, I’d be the last to argue that modernity is psychologically healthy (and I’ve got the fancy shrink and wall of carefully selected prescription anxiolytics to prove it), I just find it ironic that the ‘feelings of powerlessness’/‘actual powerlessness’ ratio of modernity is so high, even though the value of ‘actual powerlessness’ in modern societies is so low. This affirms the theory that we are churning out really significant ‘feelings of powerlessness’ numbers, faster than we are lowering ‘actual powerlessness’; but it’s always struck me as sort of interesting.

People have long been sucking up to imaginary deities, and just plain drinking themselves shitfaced at every opportunity, but for most of that time they’ve also been subject to what we would think of as harrowing levels of powerlessness(rightsless subjects of god king/one bad harvest away from famine, infant mortality in the 30+ percent range, some trivial little infection could be the death of you, etc, etc, etc.)